Rabid (2019)

(On Cable TV, October 2020) If anyone’s going to remake 1970s Cronenberg, I’m glad it’s the Soska Sisters. Returning to the icky kind of horror à la American Mary, the Soskas cleverly expand upon Cronenberg’s original Rabid with far better technical assets at their disposal (the makeup effects to depict the result of a motorcycle accident are… terrifying) and also a bit more realism in their presentation. Matters of transhumanism (and the vocabulary of a public health crisis that rings disturbingly eerie in pandemic-dominated 2020) make this feel like a 2010s film rather than a 1970s remake. Not everything is perfect, though: the film is definitely too long (I accidentally started watching it twenty minutes into the film, and when I went back to see what I had missed, I didn’t feel as if I had missed anything), and the balance between the personal story of the protagonist and the wider outbreak of “rabies” feels disconnected to the point of being useless. I’m also not crazy about transhumanism being held up (here and in other places) as the new boogeyman of medical horror—but that’s just me. Still, this new version of Rabid does a few things better than the original. The ending is better than the original; the heroine is far better developed; the story has been justifiably transplanted to the United States, with a few potshots at the state of their health care system. The Soskas wisely keep the full craziness of the film for the final sequence (it does get wilder than expectations), and it’s good to see them back in the full-bore horror mode after a few underwhelming action movies. Still, I think they could do better—perhaps not in execution as much as in premise: competently reheating a low-budget 1977 feature does have its merits, but isn’t it time to see them do more original material?